Re: IEEE floating point support for guile?

From:

Mikael Djurfeldt

Subject:

Re: IEEE floating point support for guile?

Date:

09 Nov 2000 21:42:17 +0100

User-agent:

Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) Emacs/20.7

Chris Hanson <address@hidden> writes:
> Date: 09 Nov 2000 20:47:54 +0100
> From: Mikael Djurfeldt <address@hidden>
>
> Besides, no one of the major Scheme implementations (including Chez,
> RScheme, Bigloo and MzScheme) generate floating point exceptions. I'd
> like to understand this issue better before making the change.
>
> I guess MIT Scheme isn't one of the major Scheme implementations any
> more. Sigh.
Oops.. that was sloppy of me---sorry.
At any rate, it seems to me that also the case when floating-point
exceptions aren't generated can be useful.
In many instances of numerical calculation, you *know* that singular
values will occur in some places, but the results can be useful
anyway. A simple example is when plotting a function with
singularities at some points.
There are cases where it's more interesting to study the resulting
vector or matrix and note in which slots you have got singular values
instead of getting an exception when the singular value is generated.
The latter is useful if there's a bug in the program. The former is
useful if there's a numerical problem.